Falafel in the land of Chips!

Greetings from the Great Smoke aka: London!!

  Just a quick note to let you all know that I'm currently in the capital and so far everything's been great!! Met up with the Irish Alexandrian a couple of times to take in some of the sights.

   Looking forward to heading to another capital city on Monday, Cardiff this time. Look out Wales FalafelandChips is on the way!!!

   More detalis of my trip so far willl be posted once I'm back in Cairo and will include:

• Report and pictures of the Tewkesbury Medieval Festival.
• Report and pictures of Tewkesbury Abbey.
• Report and pictures of The Tower of London.
• Report and pictures of Cardiff.
• Anything else I can think of!!

Blog to you all soon!

xx

To 'B' or to 'P'? That is the question!

  Well it is if you're an Arabic speaker learning English or a teacher tearing your hair out in despair at silly spelling mistakes.
   Despite the fact that the Arabic alphabet has 28 characters to the English alphabet's 26, there is no equivalent to the letter 'P' only 'B'. This has lead Egyptians to come up with a unique way of differentiating between the two to help with spelling, there's B khafifa ('light' B) and B tekila ('heavy' B).
   Now if you guessed that the 'light' B is 'P' and the 'heavy' B is B,well sorry you're wrong! For years I was convinced that was the right way round, because to me as a native English speaker it made more sense, and the I had to remember that it was the opposite of what made sense. The only reason I've managed to find so far for the naming is that P is light as its 'hump' is at the top, while the hump of the 'b' is at the bottom making it heavy.Get it?

 So tomorrow I'm off to change my Egybtian bounds into Pritish pounds and sign things with a plue ben!